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The reality is DTP outside of pro sectors (i.e. these days InDesign) was rendered worthless by how ubiquitous the tooling was.

In any sector where the barriers to entry are destroyed you either have to go really big or go home.

And for publisher there probably isn’t the same network effect as for Word/Excel/Powerpoint.

> And for publisher there probably isn’t the same network effect as for Word/Excel/Powerpoint.

There isn't because any serious print shop will laugh you out the door if you come to them with a Publisher file.

Publisher is fine for home/office printing, and you will probably get away with it at your local corner shop that does digital printing on a Xerox box in the back of the shop.

But if you're sending stuff off to the big-boys you will suddenly find yourself needing to adhere to artwork preflight settings, colour profiles, PDF and TAC specs.

Not only will the printer give you validation settings files you can load into Acrobat and Indesign, but if there are issues, the printer's preflight team will be more willing (and able !) to help you if you are using industry-standard tools.

> There isn't because any serious print shop will laugh you out the door if you come to them with a Publisher file.

You say this like customers don't show up with a PowerPoint file.

I'm pretty sure they not only show up with a PowerPoint file, but one with missing/nonembedded fonts, web images, perhaps even a video in there somewhere. At least that's been my experience with people sending me stuff to print.

When I did IT work for my university, I was in charge of a big plotter printer that the science students used to print posters with summaries of their research for conferences. The only format I ever got was PowerPoint. Based on the number of search results for "powerpoint research poster template", it looks like this PowerPoint is still the format of choice.

I never really thought about it, but it is kind of odd that the same community that loves using LaTeX for document formatting and typesetting research papers is also using PowerPoint as a desktop publishing substitute.

Sorry but what does this mean? I can't quite parse it. What tooling was ubiquitous?

They probably meant Publisher, which was a part of every more expensive MS Office deal. It was simple to use and much more suitable than Word for simple design jobs (business cards, leaflets, stationary, etc) and with which the "average" MS Office user could now do what was once the domain of DTP "professionals".

I did not mean this.

So please tell us what you did mean.

I am perfectly happy with the original statement.

No, we don’t mind. Go ahead.

Taken literally, your statement said that [non-pro] DTP died because it had good tooling. I don't know what tooling for DTP is, but it seems unlikely so good that it would kill the software it supports, so your comment seems like nonsense. Why bother posting it if you're perfectly happy with that?

The real truth is more boring: DTP didn't die at all, it just merged as a category of software with word processors because computers got powerful enough to run programs with a union of their features. Whether the programs in this new combined category got called one thing or the other mainly depended on their history: Word and InDesign today have a lot more in common with each other than either does with programs from the early 1990s that are nominally in their respective categories. Whatever you were saying, it didn't seem to be that, so it was wrong anyway! But I asked nicely because I was curious if there was some substance there.

A lot of this seems to be related to death of the amateur and semi-pro DTP industries:

1. Printers stopped catering to semi-pros and became more binary between "home" and "enterprise" solutions, with very little crossover and with "home" products trying to be as "good enough" dumb as possible (and also in many cases nearly as hostile to semi-pro usage as possible because so many "home" printers became loss leaders for ink cartridge subscriptions).

2. A lot of DTP moved to web publishing. Who needs printed invites when you have "evites"? Who needs printed greeting cards when you have "ecards" and now Facebook walls and group messaging stickers/gifs/memes? Etc.

I have fond memories of the home DTP creative scene in the 1990s. Partly because my mother was deep into it and very creative with it. It is interesting how much has changed between that era (when Publisher was one of several nearly ubiquitous home tools alongside Print Shop) to today (where Print Shop is a dead brand for many years and Publisher has been zombie-like or comatose in the same span, and now scheduled for death).

Aww yeah Print Shop! Dot Matrix cards ftw!

No-one will pay for it, but the presence of Publisher, as a tool that people know and use, in the Office Suite, would probably be a substantial feature for many people.

Which is funny because here in Seattle there is starting to be a resurgence of DTP to some degree. But it's very underground and, being already in a tech hub, likely very niche from a macroeconomics viewpoint.

I used Publisher (2.0! and then 95) quite a bit in the mid to late 1990s. I haven't used it since then because Word now has all the features that were previously exclusive to Publisher, so its purpose has evaporated. It's certainly true that Word has bugs and frustrations but I'd be surprised if Publisher didn't too.

It's very odd that they propose PowerPoint as the Publisher replacement. How do you create a fold out leaflet in PowerPoint!? Maybe most of the people left using Publisher actually only need PowerPoint's features, rather than the full power of Word?

> How do you create a fold out leaflet in PowerPoint!?

There appear to be templates for this in Powerpoint

You need more than a template if you're going to make a booklet by folding a piece of paper in 4 - half of the "pages" (quarter pages) need to be upside down.

In truth, I haven't tried this in Word either, although it appears to be possible in page setup. Maybe I just stopped using Publisher when I started getting duplex printers. Or even stopped needing silly layouts for school projects.

Isn’t that a feature that best sits in the printer dialog, to be used with whatever application you want?

PowerPoint is probably the replacement because it doesn't restrict where things can be placed (at least not by default). Word would be much more suitable, if only they made and advertised some sort of DTP mode that would do away with the image position defaults and let users put things over margins.

Do you mean changed the default text box / picture / drawing canvas mode from "in line" to "in front of text" (which lets you put it anywhere, including over margins)? You actually can do that in advanced options. "DTP mode" sounds like marketing overkill for a simple option but maybe it would help.

Pretty much. The pattern I'm noticing is users see that drawing in Word is cumbersome (layout features "get in the way") while in PowerPoint they can put things all over the place, so they naturally gravitate towards PowerPoint when they feel they don't need a classic letter layout but rather an "empty canvas" they can do whatever with.

It can all be done in Word too, but most people I've seen using Word don't bother even setting image placement for each image or change margins. They just stick with what's default.

I actually agree with you that a whole mode is an overkill, but I think whatever they put in they'd have to market pretty well so users would consider it at all. So it also makes sense to me they'd say "use PowerPoint instead" as it is what many are already doing.

I'm going to imagine anyone who needs to make fold-out leaflets is going to end up either doing it in Creative Cloud (i.e. InDesign), or these days, will just do it in Figma or Canva.

Microsoft abandoning Publisher is just another example of Microsoft's endless tactical retreats. Eventually, they aren't going to have anything other than Word and Excel (and maybe Outlook, but I'd say it looks iffy for that one).

The worst part about MS Office isn't the direct user experience, because I can usually choose to use other software. The worst part is that I and everybody else are subjected to the documents that Office produces. Their defaults and their UX inevitably produce stuff that is hard to read and inconsistent, unless you fight the software really hard and make sacrifices with your desired output. And there's no escape from it. Another specimen of Word's 2.5 cm margins, 200-character lines in poorly designed knockoff Helvetica will probably find its way to my mailbox before the end of the day.

I have fond memories of Publisher. We used it to layout our school newspaper back in the 90ies. I even considered going into the DTP field as a career and did a small internship. But I soon realised that while I can easily master the technical aspect and learn all the rules, my "design work" just doesn't "pop".

Nonetheless, for years after, I was the goto layout guy if a relative needed something done. I soon stopped using Publisher after I "found" a copy of QuarkXPress.

Weird that with as much as they're pushing Co-Pilot everywhere, they for some reason can't use it to maintain Publisher. Maybe Co-Pilot isn't as good as Microsoft claims.

What's crazier is that it actually stops working if installed.

Of the last two times I had to make a flyer, one of the two I pulled up PowerPoint to accomplish. It's not a completely outlandish direction. They should add a Publisher mode that transforms the interface for print document design.

>My pet theory is that the younger generation never realized Publisher existed

For most it didn't. The non 365 Office came in 3 tiers Student, business, and enterprise. Publisher only came with enterprise.

> Hilariously, the suggested replacement is PowerPoint,

"Did he just tell me to go fuck myself?" "I believe he did."

I last used Publisher way back in the late nineties to lay out the school newsletter, later I graduated to PageMaker because I found Publisher easy to use but ultimately quite limiting. Fun memories, I hadn’t even realised Publisher still existed, and I’m the most elder of elder millennials.

> They also are actively decreasing the value by sunsetting Publisher in October 2026.

You have my sympathy. I was also a frequent MS Publisher user, and I always felt that not many people knew about it. It's a useful, simple DTP package suitable for many less complex page layout scenarios. After the End-of-Support announcement, I switched to the LibreOffice Draw already. Fortunately, LibreOffice Draw works quite nicely as a Publisher replacement for me. There is also Scribus [1].

[1]: https://www.scribus.net/

Powerpoint for DTP... did the person writing that know what Publisher even is ?

Not to worry. Once they unleash those AI enhanced vibe programmers that are doing %33 more programming on this problem all will be good. The AI is already helping them to become more profitable by making it necessary to charge more for their product. The sky's the limit. Or Skynet's the limit;)

InDesign also includes Pantone and is the logical go to for anyone who truly cares about modern DTP

> My pet theory is that the younger generation never realized Publisher existed or was included in M365

For a very long time Publisher was marketed to home users who want to do some simple DTP work, and not to businesses. This is a very different audience than businesses.

Install LibreOffice.

I used Scribus. Top choice for replacing Publisher by open source software. Scribus is very intuitive and with enough time I could churn out a beautiful looking effective resume on my first try

Not the same feature set at all. And doesn't LibreOffice still have decade+ long issues on anything that isn't strictly word processing?

You can still open them. More than I can say for Office.

Sunsetting a product to save money smells like promo-driven culture

I was thinking the same thing about people seemingly not knowing about Publisher.

And I always found those memes about photos moving around your text annoying, because that it literally what you want when making a document (you know, what Word is designed for) (but you can just change the behaviour if you want a different layout anyway).

This one caught me by surprise. Publisher is a really great tool to create internal documents…reminds me of the Adobe Fireworks fiasco. They force you to use a tool of which you only need 5% and pay an increase cost (time and subscription) 500%.

I mean, Powerpoint, really? That app should’ve been gone a long time.

Except Publisher was never good compared to the competition.

Pretty sure Gemini could create a Slides doc from a PDF of a Publisher file.